About

Vanessa Freije is an Associate Professor of International Studies and History at the University of Washington. Her research examines the history of information and media politics in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mexico. She authored the book Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico, published in October 2020 with Duke University Press, which was awarded the American Historical Association’s Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the History of Journalism. The book explores how media scandals shaped social imaginaries and forged new modes of political engagement from the 1960s through the 1980s. Freije has written various articles on rumors, the formation of the public sphere, and inter-American information politics, published in prominent journals such as the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of Social History, and the Journal of Global History. Her research has been supported by several institutions, including the Fulbright-García Robles and the U.S.-Mexican Studies Center at UC San Diego. She is currently working on a new project about the history of outer space communications satellites in Mexico, analyzing the significance of connection and disconnection for a country on the periphery of the global space race.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Art
• Media studies
• Literature
• History

Selected publications

• “The Word of the State against Ours”: The Right to Know and State Terror in 1970s Mexico

  Comparative Studies in Society and History · 2026-04-23

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article brings together two stories of 1970s Mexico that are often narrated separately: the story of the PRI’s attempts to reform itself, specifically through the right to know, and the story of activists’ mobilizations against disappearances. Epistemic struggles surrounding the right to know and disappearances created a shared discursive arena in which activists and state officials contested the nature of information, the authority to produce it, and the seemingly unbridgeable gap between evidence and the state’s recognition of wrongdoing. Debates in the legislative and activist realms often occurred in parallel without necessarily intersecting. Nonetheless, they engaged similar questions: What would it mean to entrust the public and media with sensitive information? What strategies could move state actors to produce information and what effects would doing so have on public life? This article contends that the struggle over information and recognition became the central battlefield for negotiating state violence and opening in Mexico.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Australia, fighting Facebook, is the latest country to struggle against foreign influence on journalism

  2021-02-19

  preprint1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Interpretative Challenges in the Archive: An Introduction

  Journal of Social History · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract The twenty-first century has already seen extensive handwringing over how disinformation, “fake news,” and conspiracy theories shape contemporary politics. While social media and new technologies have undoubtedly accelerated the dissemination of such information, the problem of how unauthorized, dubious, or discredited claims shape political subjectivities and historical events is not new. In Latin America and the Caribbean, as elsewhere, conflicts over credibility and truth abound in the historical archive, leaving traces of rumor, denunciation, and even outright forgery that pose interpretative challenges for historians. We argue that dubious or challenged claims, instead of unreliable narratives to be separated out and discarded, are an important constitutive part of the historical record and often altered material realities. Introducing readers to select historical cases from Latin America and the Caribbean, we argue that some especially resonant denunciations, forgeries, rumors, and counter-narratives behave less like plot than like event.

  PublisherDOI

• Citizens of Scandal

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• A Peoples’ Policy for the Americas

  NACLA Report on the Americas · 2020-01-02

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Citizens of Scandal

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science

  Vanessa Freije explores the causes and consequences of political scandals in Mexico from the 1960s through the 1980s, showing how Mexico City reporters began to denounce government corruption during this period in ways that defined the Mexican public sphere in the late twentieth century.

  PublisherDOI

• Selling Democracy and Press Freedom to the Third World

  Diplomatic History · 2020-11-05

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In December 1983, the United States announced its intention to leave the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Great Britain followed suit shortly thereafter and formally withdrew in 1985. The principal reason for these dramatic departures was UNESCO’s alleged “hostility toward the basic institutions of a free society, especially a free market and a free press.”1 Both the United States and Great Britain complained that Third World representatives were undermining the free flow of information, a value that the agency’s Constitution vowed to defend. Over the previous decade, many UNESCO delegates had questioned the fundamental tenets of liberal press freedom by advocating for a New International Information Order (NIIO), which called upon governments to guarantee fair media content and to globally redistribute information technology. Whereas North Atlantic countries emphasized negative press freedom, principally freedom from state interference, representatives from decolonized, non-aligned, or so-called developing nations—what I refer...

  PublisherDOI

• Citizens of Scandal: Journalism, Secrecy, and the Politics of Reckoning in Mexico

  2020-09-14 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In Citizens of Scandal, Vanessa Freije explores the causes and consequences of political scandals in Mexico from the 1960s through the 1980s. Tracing the process by which Mexico City reporters denounced official wrongdoing, she shows that by the 1980s political scandals were a common feature of the national media diet. News stories of state embezzlement, torture, police violence, and electoral fraud provided collective opportunities to voice dissent and offered an important, though unpredictable and inequitable, mechanism for political representation. The publicity of wrongdoing also disrupted top-down attempts by the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) to manage public discourse, exposing divisions within the party and forcing government officials to grapple with popular discontent. While critical reporters denounced corruption, they also withheld many secrets from public discussion, sometimes out of concern for their safety. Freije highlights the tensions-between free speech and censorship, representation and exclusion, and transparency and secrecy-that defined the Mexican public sphere in the late-twentieth century

  PublisherDOI

• Cultures of Authoritarianism and Resistance in Mexico and Brazil

  Latin American Research Review · 2019-12-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay reviews the following works:Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil. By Benjamin A. Cowan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 311. 39.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780826358370.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Mexican Press and Civil Society 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street. By Benjamin T. Smith

  Journal of Social History · 2019-08-16

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The rise of mass media altered the nature of political governance and civic engagement in Mexico. At midcentury, rapid urbanization and public education introduced an ever-greater number of people to radio broadcasts, comic books, and nationalistic films. Benjamin T. Smith’s new book, The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street, argues that “newspapers, rather than individual experience, interpersonal gossip, radio, or TV, became the key mediators between citizens and the state” (1). In so doing, Smith challenges longstanding assumptions about literacy, print media, and everyday politics, demonstrating that the press was integral to the political lives of ordinary Mexicans. In the book’s first section, “The Reading Public,” Smith shows that newspaper readership rose dramatically from the 1940s to the 1970s. This chapter draws upon ethnographies, U.S. advertising agency data, and media surveys to give greater texture to literacy figures. Drawing out compelling anecdotes, Smith renders Mexican cities as teeming with paper advertisements, cheaply printed song sheets, and broadsides. He also documents the high circulation of sports and crime tabloids and regional periodicals. In so doing, he contributes to an emergent body of scholarship, which argues that Mexican worldviews were forged through engagement with print media.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rachel Nolan

  Drexel University

  1 shared

• Daniel Bessner

  University of Washington

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• American Historical Association’s Eugenia M. Palmegiano Priz…